Alt Left: Karl Marx, “The Genesis of Capital”: The Creation of Capitalism and Its Link to Modern Land Reform

This fascinating document is available in booklet form as it is only ~35 pages. It is an excerpt from the larger Capital volume. It’s not an easy read but it’s not impossible either.

Some of the writing is gorgeous. I read one sentence to my very anti-Communist liberal Democrat father and he swooned over the prose. That one sentence was both perfect and beautiful, though it dealt with some terrible.

In many places, this is forceful – see the fencing of the Commons in the 1300’s, done deliberately to force the peasants into the capitalist mode or production. Indeed theorists said that if the peasants could not be shoved into capitalism, there would be no capitalism, for their would be no workers. It was essential to destroy the peasants ability to live off the land for themselves in order to force them into worse circumstances as industrial workers.

We see this very same rhetoric employed today in India – where it is argued that the tribals in Chattisargh and other places must be uprooted from the lands, have their lands stolen from them to give to mining and forest industries, and forced into the capitalist mode in cities in order to properly develop the economy. It is argued that India cannot develop its economy until the Adivasis have been destroyed. Note that as with the ancient peasants, the Adivasis will live much poorer lives in the cities than the were in the rural areas.

In Colombia, we see something very similar. In Colombia, small farmers own a lot of land. They are able to subsist off this land and they do not need to participate in the larger economy. They grow enough food for themselves and some city people. The process of the Colombian revolution and the genocidal response of the Colombian oligarchy to it is all throwing the peasants off of these small plots, stealing their land at gunpoint (the paramilitaries are used for this), and terrorizing or killing them if they refuse to hand over their land.

The land is then confiscated by latifundias or large landowners who by and large control the Colombian economy. They grow coffee, bananas, etc. and raise cattle for export, generating money for the economy in the process.

In fact, this process has been going on all over Latin America for over 200 years as sort of a slow-motion process of ethnic cleansing and land theft. Smalholders are able to live off the land in Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay, and Brazil, and this is seen as unacceptable as they only grow food for themselves and possibly for city-dwellers but the produce cannot be exported.

These countries wish to develop an export model of agriculture based on the large scale production of food crops for export mostly to the US. In return, their ability to produce their own food is destroyed, in my opinion, rendering their economies completely backwards. The people are then rendered vulnerable to the purchase of imported food from the US, often packaged or canned food that is not very good for you.

As you can see, the country gets screwed and the US wins both ways. By destroying the basis for feeding themselves, the US wins an export market for its processed foods. By replacing these with food crops for export to the US, the US gets to make money by importing and selling these food crops. In return the country gains nothing.

Only a small landholding and import-export elite (maybe 2

And in the process, of course, the country generates a revolutionary movement, often an armed one.

This can be seen in areas of Colombia. In one particular part of Southern Colombia, most of the rural peasantry had been thrown off the land and most of the land was now held by a few large landowners who were raising cattle on the land. The peasants had been terrorized off of their stolen land and formed ghettos in a large city nearby, which increased the poverty rate and the slump percentage of the city by a lot. Here they were poor, unhealthy, poorly fed and clothed, living in slums in shacks with no sewage systems, clean water or electricity.

These slums began to generate a lot of street crime as they tend to do. Outside of the cities on the main roads, there were soldiers and paramilitaries everywhere and one went from one armed roadblock to the other. Curiously enough, a large guerrilla movement had developed among the few remaining peasants and in teeming slums. Armed guerrillas extorted the latifundias for money that they called “war taxes.” The latifundias now paid a lot of money for paramilitaries to patrol their lands.

In the slums, an urban guerrilla movement was developing. Police, soldiers and paramilitary members were attacked with bombs, RPG’s and automatic weapons all the time and took significant casualties. The war had now moved to the city where there was no war before. Bomb and gun attacks hit city police stations on a regular basis. Death squads and army units roamed the land and the unarmed Left in the form or human rights activists, labor union members and organizers, community organizers and activists, environmentalists, campesino organizations, organizations of slum-dwellers and indigineous leaders were murdered and tortured to death on a regular basis.

The idiot US and the West see this as a process of “Communist guerrillas trying to subvert Colombian democracy, shoot their way into power, and set up a murderous Communist dictatorship which will destroy freedom and prosperity in Colombia”. The vast majority of Americans and others in the West actually buy this bullshit. Many on the Left refuse to support the Colombian guerrilla, insisting that they are anachronistic and that they should try to seek power peacefully. However, since the FARC disarmed, former members and members of newly formed political parties have been massacred like flies. So state terror blocks all road to peaceful change, leaving no alternative but the way of the gun.

Obviously the ridiculous analysis of this situation that Westerners believe has no basis in reality. The Western media cheers on the genocidal Colombian state and says that the Colombian democracy is waging a war against irrational and bloodthirsty terrorism, typically linked with drug trafficking to describe them as criminals and destroy their legitimacy.

As long as this process goes on, Colombia’s economy will stay forever backwards.

It is necessary to do a land reform in the rural areas before any country can prosper economically. Indeed this “socialist” project of land reform which the US spent decades in the Cold War slaughtering millions of people to stop was actually implemented by the US in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan in order to fend off a Communist threat. Oddly enough, it ended up creating the basis for subsequent booming development in those places.

Land reform was and is the basis for the Communist and Leftist revolutions and guerrilla forces in South Vietnam, Thailand, Colombia, Nepal, Peru, Cuba, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay in the past 55-65 years, with some of the revolutions happening later 40 years ago. In Paraguay this process has just started several years ago when a FARC split has taken up arms agains the state.

Repost: Alt Left: The Development of Agriculture in Africa

Repost from the old site. Great stuff. Theorizes that the birth of the modern Black race only goes back 6-12,000 years and speculates on how it developed in conjunction with primitive agriculture. Also suggests that Black Africans were probably the first agriculturalists on Earth.

The Development of Agriculture in Africa

Hang out long enough on White Nationalist fora, and after a while you will be amazed at how many White racists actually believe that Black Africans were Stone Age people who had no metalworking, no agriculture and no civilization of any sort by the time the Europeans contacted them.

It’s true that Africa is not known for its incredible cultural achievements. But it wasn’t exactly a complete backwater either. The White Nationalist line that Africans were a Paleolithic people with only stone implements and no agriculture is surprisingly widespread. Too bad it is horribly wrong.

First of all, agriculture comes to the Sahel as early as 9000 BC. It comes to West Africa around the same time. Later it goes to Southern and Eastern Africa. The “Niggers are too stupid to grow food” line, appalling in its stupidity, continues to retain a lot of currency. Africans have been growing food for 1000’s of years.

The latest permutation has to do with Zimbabwe. Ruined by US and UK sanctions that have completely shut the nation out of the international trade and banking system, the economy is imploding and people are starving.

Instead of blaming imperialism, White racists blame those dumb niggers for overthrowing White rule and confiscating White farms where 5,000 White farmers had 5

They need Homo Blancas Superiorus to show them how to plant seeds and hoe rows. Without White Johnny Appleseeds to grow the food for them that they are too stupid to grow for themselves, the dumb niggers in Africa will all starve to death.

Incredible.

All over Africa, there are hardly any Whites left. Blacks are growing food all over Africa, in every country, in vast numbers. Black Africans are surely smart enough to figure out how to grow food to eat.

In order to look into this story in greater depth, we need to look at the development of Blacks in Africa from an anthropological point of view. The story of Stone Age Africans with no agriculture until Whitey shows up is nonsense.

White Nationalists counter that African Blacks, even over 10,000 years ago, were too stupid to figure out how to grow stuff on their own, so they had to learn from superior Caucasian North Africans. This theory is humorous because in general, White Nationalists refer to North African Caucasians (Berbers and Egyptians) as non-Whites.

Furthermore, at over 10,000 years ago, I’m not sure it matters how Black Africans got agriculture. Cultural diffusion occurs everywhere, and true innovation is pretty hard to pin down. Finally, there is not a lot of evidence that North African Caucasians innovated agriculture at such an early date themselves. As a result, the whole discussion is rendered academic as just another way for racist Whites to kick the Black man while he’s down.

First of all, the original Africans looked like Pygmies or Khoisan (Bushmen). From 6,000-12,000 years ago, Pygmy-Khoisan types traverse from archaic types to the modern Blacks we know today. Modern Blacks are a young race. Pygmies and Khoisan resemble our oldest human ancestors. They have light brown skin and gracile, child-like bodies.

Modern Blacks mostly speak languages related to a huge family called Niger-Congo. During the transition from archaic to modern Blacks, modern Blacks developed agriculture. Blacks had agriculture or proto-agriculture possibly as early as 10,000 years ago when Proto-Niger-Congo first started breaking up.

This means that Black Africans were actually some of the first agriculturalists on Earth. Sango Region hunter-gatherers were the first Blacks to develop agriculture. At first they protected wild grain fields, and then made clearings for wild yams and oil palms. At 12,000 years before present (YBP) they were already using hoes that they made, and at 8-9,000 YBP, they were tending pili nut trees with agricultural implements.

There are agricultural terms in reconstructed Proto-Niger-Congo from before 10,000 YBP, so they must have had some form of agriculture. Mande  is a branch  of Niger-Congo. Proto-Mande speakers inhabited the Niger’s headwaters at the Mali-Guinea border near the modern city of Bamako, and they were the first group to break off from Proto-Niger-Congo.

The Fouta Djallon Highlands in Southeastern Guinea, source of the Niger River. This is probably where Black African agriculture, cultivated by Proto-Mande speakers, began over 10,000 years ago.

 

Modern Black Africans are associated with the spread of agriculture in Africa at this time, and this agricultural spread is also located at the headwaters of the Niger, because this is the cradle of the Sudanic Food Complex.

Also, agriculture independently evolved in West Africa (African yams, kola nut) and Ethiopia (coffee, tef) during the period of 4,000-9,000 YBP.

Animal husbandry was widely adopted, and by 7,200 YBP, the Sahel had a full array of food production (cultivated crops, animal husbandry) before this full array was developed in Egypt. So the movement of agriculture in its full array from North African Caucasians to Sahelian Blacks is shown to be a lie.

It’s true that Africa south of the Equator lagged behind, and White Nationalists love to go about this, but the truth is that there were no animals to domesticate down there, nor were there any plants to domesticate either.

It’s doubtful that the Sahelian Blacks were any smarter than the ones south of Equator. They were just better positioned to receive animals for husbandry from Southwest Asia, and they had plants that could be domesticated.

Development of agriculture in modern Blacks also seems to have led to high testosterone levels along with more robust body types. See the prior post for more on that.

The first real classical Black Negroid skeleton dates to only 6,500 YBP. Before that, at 12,000 YBP, they look more like the San or Pygmies. Within 6,000 years as Africans moved to agriculture, Blacks changed from gracile archaic types to robust Negroid types. At 6,000-7,000 YBP, the agricultural transition was full.

In contrast to Afrocentric hokum about Black Athena and Black Egypt, modern Blacks do not appear in Egyptian paintings before 4,000 YBP. Before that, the Blacks in northeast Africa, Nubia and Ethiopia were more gracile San (Bushmen) types.

Modern Blacks reach the middle Nile by around 4,000 YBP. At 3,000 YBP, the Bantus spread from Cameroon all through East, Central and Southern Africa, of course bringing agriculture, and yes, iron-making, with them.

Nubians do not obtain their modern Black appearance until 2,700 years ago. Before that, the Nubians and presumably the Hamites look like today’s Egyptians.

Black populations in Africa do not bode well for Philippe Rushton’s R-K Theory. The oldest African populations of all, the Pygmies and the San, with presumably some of the lowest IQ’s (the San have IQ’s of about 54), are very highly K-selected.

They have low fecundity (are not very fertile) and very long intervals between births. This is normally what is expected of a super-K-selected group such as NE Asians, and is said to be associated with high IQ. Yet in the San, it is associated with the lowest IQ’s on Earth. Rushton’s theory does not smell right.

References

Rushton, J. P. 1995. Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 2nd Special Abridged Edition. Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute.

Alt Left: All That Glitters Is Not Capitalist: Various Types of Non-Capitalist Forms of Production That Work Well

Rahul:

I would argue that being pragmatic while being a communist is almost impossible. Communism doesn’t work, because humans are too greedy.

A mixture of a bunch of ideologies is probably the way to go.

If you are talking about hardcore Communism with the state running everything and no market or private enterprise as in the USSR, nobody wants to go back to that anyway. Even most Communists don’t want to go back to that.

But otherwise, you are just wrong. Most Communists nowadays see some sort of a role for a market. There are lots of ways to do this.

For instance, in Venezuela, various neighborhood groups and communities operate bread factories, farms, on and on. They sell the bread at a small reasonable profit to the community. The proceeds and profits are invested back into the enterprise and used to pay the salaries of the employees.

The farms and animal husbandry industries work along the same lines. A community will be organized as a commune. They will raise chickens for eggs or pigs or they will grow various crops.

They then sell the eggs, pigs, or crops to other communities for a reasonable profit. The proceeds and profits are invested back into the company, used to pay the salaries of the workers, and if there is anything left over, they are invested in the community itself – new sidewalks, new roads, a new health facility, water treatment, a community center, on and on.

The Venezuelan communes are considered to be a non-capitalist form of development.

Communists all around the world have supported this model. The Chinese Communists are operating a form of market socialism that utilizes a market mechanism. The Vietnamese Communists are doing the same. The Cuban Communists are doing something similar.

Most Communists also support the cooperative movement, where workers own the enterprise and compete against other firms, including capitalist firms. The enterprise either sinks or swims.

The proceeds and profits are best collected by a regional bank, which reinvests them in the enterprise, uses them to pay salaries, or even gives bonuses to the workers. So a very successful enterprise that made a lot of profits could end up having some workers who were making some good money if they were pocketing some of the profits.

When you give the workers the control over what to do with the money – whether to sink it back into the enterprise or to take it home as increased paychecks, workers tend to choose to take home the bigger checks. This is what happened with Yugoslavia’s otherwise very successful worker self-managed Communism.

The workers would not put enough money back into the firms to keep them going, and the firms would start to deteriorate to the point where they were no longer operative. So everyone was out of a job. But no worries as everyone got a bigger paycheck!

In the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Country in Spain, a similar system has unfolded and has been successful for a long time now. There, the workers elect their own management, which is a great idea in my opinion. You would think that workers would elect management that let them slide and screw off, but they elect very good managers.

The decisions about what to do with the proceeds and profits – whether to sink them back into the enterprise or to take them home in higher worker wages – is left up to management and ultimately large regional banks.

These large regional banks are the ultimate owners of all of the Mondragon cooperatives. These are public banks so they are not run on the typical profit motive. They resemble more the customer-owned credit unions in the US which give much better customer service than the capitalist banks do.

I’m not even entirely sure that credit unions are a capitalist enterprise. How can you have a capitalist enterprise that is owned by the consumers of its service? That does not seem possible.

The banks tend to make the best decisions for the firm. Keep in mind that Mondragon cooperatives utilize a non-capitalist form of development.

The problem with Mondragon is that they have to compete against capitalist firms. So all of the cutthroat behaviors that capitalists engage in to reduce costs and maximize profits – exploitation of labor, shafting consumers, investors and the public at large – means that Mondragon is forced to some extent to lower their own costs however they can to keep pace with these firms.

So Mondragon is a non-capitalist system that is still privy to the logic of capitalism in which they are ensnared.

In North Korea in the far north of the country there is a lot of private gold mining going on now in new-found reserves. They are often just one man enterprises of small groups of men working together.

The state’s footprint up there is small, and the state has stepped aside and simply lets these miners mine whatever they want. They only ask for a 2

In North Korea and Cuba there are now farmer’s markets where farmers can bring their produce directly to farmer’s markets to sell to the public. These are generally not capitalist enterprises. These are just farmers selling the product of their labor to consumers (other workers) buying their crops. There’s no tendency to maximize profits, as the prices are set by the market.

The entire cooperative sector all around the world is a non-capitalist form of development. The workers actually own the firm so there is no exploitation of labor, which is the definition of capitalism. No exploitation, no capitalism.

In this way these cooperatives have gotten rid of the division between Labor and Capital which is the backbone of any capitalist system because capitalist systems work by marking up the products of workers’ labor and then adding onto it something called surplus value when is then pocketed by the capitalist as a profit.

So a worker producing a product that is paid say $20 in labor has his product taken by the owner of the firm, which then proceeds to mark up the worker’s labor cost to $25-30, and thereby make a profit. This is called the Labor Law of Value, and it has been proven to be the backbone of the capitalist system.

As you can see here, the worker is not getting the full value of the product he produced. He produced a product worth $25-30, and he only received $20 for it, with his owner taking the $5-10 surplus value and pocketing it as profit.

Independent contractors such as electricians, plumbers, painters, attorneys, physicians, accountants, etc. are not usually capitalists at all. Instead these are just workers – albeit highly paid workers – who are simply selling their labor time to  others, mostly workers, who purchase their labor time when they hire them or use their services.

Middlemen and traders who simply intervene between the producer and walnuts and the seller of say walnuts, adding on their profit, are not capitalists. Those are simply traders or merchants. They are not exploiting anyone. They can be thought of as a form of workers who act as go-betweens vis a vis producers and sellers, adding their small amount on as a fee for helping to get the two together.

Finance capital or people who buy and sell stocks are not usually capitalists. These are like people who trade in rare books, stamps, coins, precious metals, or anything else.

The stocks and bonds are like rare coins or precious metals. They simply try to buy them at a lower rate and sell them at a higher rate, which merchants have been doing forever even long before capitalism. They have no employees so they are not exploiting anyone.

Music groups and other performers, authors, artists, sculptors, etc. are mostly just workers who sell their labor time as performers or the product of their labor as books, paintings, sculpture, DVD’s, etc. Most of these people, even bands, do not hire employees.

Now granted the book publishers, record companies, galleries, etc. are marking up the labor time and labor products of these entertainment workers and taking the surplus value, hence they are capitalists.

A big rock music band can be thought of simply as performers (workers) who make a musical product and sell it to fans, mostly other workers, who enjoy their entertainment product so much they are willing to pay good money for it. So most bands, artists, authors, sculptors, etc. are not capitalists. They’re just workers for the most part marketing their labor time or the products of their labor time.

Now granted finance capital and speculative capital, while generally not capitalist, are nevertheless regarded as “parasitic” industries because they don’t produce anything.

They can be thought of as gigantic casinos in the sky (the stock market in particular can be seen this way). Speculative capital produces nothing and often has bad effects on society. Look at the wildly inflated housing markets on the US West Coast and in New York and Paris for example.

In China under what they call market socialism or socialism with Chinese characteristics, a Communist party cell sits on the board of directors of every large corporation. When corporations get a certain size the state usually takes them over in a sense. However, the managers have large leeway how to operate their company.

All private enterprises are underneath the state or the Communist Party. The CP sees the market or the private sector as a tool for the development of the productive forces. However, the capitalists are underneath the state. They have to do what the state says.

They have to adhere to 5-year plans. Yes, the 5-year plans that were said to be so devastating to the USSR and other Communist countries are working great in China.

The government, the party, and the private sector all work together on economic goals. In this way it is similar to the state capitalism of South Korea and Japan or even Nazi Germany.

That state capitalism is a non-capitalist form of development because the state works closely with the capitalists on economic goals which are supposed to serve the nation and not just the petty temporal demands of capital for maximal profits come Hell or high water, forget about consumers, workers, society, the environment or the nation.

Under state capitalism, the state controls the commanding heights of the economy. In Japan this boils down to a several huge banks which effectively run all economic development in Japan.

Nazi Germany was similar. Yes, you could have your corporation but you had to do what the state said, or they would just take you over and confiscate your firm. So the firms in Nazi Germany in effect all worked for the state.

In China, if firms do not follow guidelines and do as they are told, the state will simply go in and seize the firm, confiscating all of its assets. The state will then take over the firm or hand it over to  a more obedient capitalist. You see here that the state rules capital. Capital has to do what the state says.

Here in the US, the market is not a tool for the development of productive forces. Instead it is a form of politics. In other words, the market or the corporations basically run society. The market is over the state. The state has to do what the corporations demand, or the corporations will get rid of the state and put in a new state.

The state obeys the demands of capital and not the other way around. Capital, the market, and the corporations are our true rulers in the US. The government simply acts as if they are employees of capital. The state does not rule us except to the extent that it carries out ruling directives that Capital gives to the state to enforce on the people.

In China state firms are often run by local municipalities. So if we had their system,  say Los Angeles and San Fransisco might both have steel mills. These mills would then compete against each other and against private firms both domestic and foreign. It’s sink or swim for all public firms in China.

Firms that are more successful see their incomes rise and more workers move to those cities to be part of those enterprises.

The workers still officially own the enterprises, but the city takes 9

Keep in mind that this can be a good paycheck, as cities running successful firms pay their workers more.

There are large cities in Southern China with 700,000 workers where 1/3 of the population works for one of the many enterprises that the city runs. The residents of the city, who are also workers for the city, have a say in how these firms are run.

For instance, they try to fight corruption, since it hurts the firms, which hurts the city, which hurts them in the end. So the firms of the city in a sense are under the control of the people who live and work in there in the sense that their input is used to make decisions about how to run the firms.

"They’re Not Oysters," by Alpha Unit

Connecticut, West Virginia, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, Nebraska, and Alaska have at least one thing in common: each has a Panhandle (WV has two). The Nebraska Panhandle is the westernmost part of Nebraska, where the prairie turns into rocky mesas, buttes, and pillars, such as Chimney Rock. It’s where the Midwest becomes the West.

Cattle outnumber people by about three to one in Nebraska. While Eastern Nebraska has excellent cropland for corn, the rest of the state is abundant with grassland for cattle grazing. In the semi-arid Panhandle, cattle ranching dominates. That means Rocky Mountain Oysters are a celebrated delicacy.

This past April the Sidney Shooting Park held its 8th Annual Rocky Mountain Oyster Fry and Fundraiser at the Cheyenne County Fairgrounds west of Sidney, Nebraska. At the Silver Dollar Bar and Grill, also in Sidney, you can stop in for cold beer, onion rings, and Rocky Mountain Oysters – described by one satisfied customer as hot, fresh, and tender.

They might have been hot, fresh, and tender, but you and I know that there aren’t any oyster reefs in Nebraska. These Oysters are bull testicles – or, more accurately, calf testicles. In spring or early summer, ranchers dehorn and castrate bull calves that they won’t be using as breeding stock. They call these non-breeding stock steers. The males that keep their testicles and are later used as breeding stock they call bulls. The main purpose of castration is to calm their tempers, says Dr. Jake Geis, cattle rancher and veterinarian.

Simply put, bulls like to fight. They fight to establish dominance and even after they settle the hierarchy, they fight to re-assert dominance. Dr. Geis says that he’s worked on bulls that have been banged up fighting each other; sometimes the animal is so badly injured that a rancher has no choice but to put it down. Breeding bulls are essential so the problem can’t be entirely avoided, but castrating the non-breeding animals reduces the number of bulls from half the calf crop to three or four.

Also, bulls are more aggressive toward people than steers. Castrating bulls makes them mellower and safer to work with. A herdsman could be seriously injured or killed by a bull while loading or unloading them via trailers.

Another problem, says Dr. Geis, is that when bull calves reach puberty, they want to start breeding. Young females, or heifers, on the other hand, aren’t ready to breed. They can get pregnant but they can’t yet safely deliver and raise a calf. Castration eliminates this problem.

Arguably the most important reason for castrating bull calves is that Americans prefer the taste of steer meat to that of bull meat. The hormone profile of steers with their reduced testosterone changes the flavor of the meat. Dr. Geis says that not all cultures share this preference. He mentions that in Italian culture bull meat is preferred. This means they raise the bulls to harvest weight but have to manage all the problems with aggressiveness and fighting.

With a pair of organs coming off each calf, ranchers could easily end up with scores of them in a day’s work. The dogs get their share before the ranchers, herdsmen, and their families cook the rest just as they would any other part of the animal. The same as cattlemen have done for centuries all over the world.

When they’re not castrating bulls, beef cattle herdsmen are doing various other things with cattle such as feeding, giving vaccinations, tagging or branding, trimming hooves, assisting with births, performing artificial insemination, loading animals onto trailers, driving feed trucks, maintaining pastures, mending fences, and just about anything else that needs to be done on the ranch or feedlot.

Setting the Record Straight About Pre-Contact Africa

John Engelman: Agriculture and civilization select a race for intelligence. Caucasians began agriculture about eleven thousand years ago. We began civilization about five thousand years ago. Negroes only adopted agriculture about four thousand years ago. They never developed their own civilizations. They have only recently been exposed to White civilization.

Agriculture was probably developed by Africans before it was developed by anyone else. There is evidence for agriculture or pre-agriculture in Africa (West African Guinea Highlands) as early as 12,000 YBP. You must realize that Africans originated many things that we as humans do.

The next to develop agriculture were the Mayans (corn), the Chinese (rice), and the Papuans (yams), all at 9,000 YBP. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians were not far behind. Africans even had plantation agriculture as early as 900 CE in Tanzania. I doubt if Caucasians developed agriculture 11,000 YBP. Are we referring to Mesopotamia, the Levant, or Egypt here?

Animal husbandry was also developed very early on in Africa. It may have been developed in the Western Sahara before anywhere else on Earth. A figure of 9,000 YBP is suggested for animal husbandry in the Sahara. However, pigs may have been domesticated in Papua around this time also. Animal husbandry was widespread in Africa, particularly in the Sahara, the Sahel and Ethiopia, on contact. I don’t know much about animal husbandry further south, but I have heard there was a shortage of animals to domesticate.

At any rate, the invention of the hoe and subsequent hoe agriculture along with the spear played a major role in the history of Africa. Both derived from the early development of metallurgy in the form or iron. Indeed, the Iron Age came to Africa before it came to Europe. The development of iron metallurgy and the subsequent creation of those two iron tools allowed the Bantus to expand massively all over Central and South Africa in only the last 2-3,000 years.

Africans definitely had civilizations, that’s for sure. Mostly in West Africa but quite a few in the Sahel too. There was even a civilization in Rhodesia. Early European explorers drew drawings of large African cities. Looks like civilization to me. Civilizations were especially common in Nigeria. They had manufacture, trade, agriculture for export, all sorts of things.

The Real Story of Zimbabwe: I Would Rather Starve on My Feet Than Feast on My Knees

RL: Reminds me of the situation in Zimbabwe when the Blacks destroyed all the White farms and drove the farmers out of the country and then all the Blacks sat around and said, “Whoa! We ain’t gots no food! Someone please gibs us some food! We hungry!” Jason Y: Yeah, but didn’t you say Zimbabwe was a justified state. Aren’t you a fan?

I wrote some long posts on what happened. 2,000 White farmers from the UK owned half of all the land and about all of the decent arable land. The crops were all grown for export, and most of the Blacks were starving and malnourished. The Blacks were forced onto marginal lands which they farmed. However, yields were poor, and most importantly, the land was eroding away due to its poor nature for farming. So this situation was not working out. Mugabe came in and said we have to deal with this land situation. He offered to buy out the White farmers, and then the state was going to deal with the land with state farms, leasing it out to small Black farmers or whatever. However, no matter how much money he offered, the UK kept saying they were going to pay and then never paid, and the negotiations went on forever. The truth was the UK never intended to allow the farmers to be bought out ever, and they wanted to drag this out until the end of time. The US was helping the UK in this disgusting racist charade. This went on for a long time, and nothing happened, and people started getting mad. The US and UK started slapping all these sanctions on Zimbabwe for no good reason, and the economy started going down the tubes. Meanwhile, Mugabe’s base were the war veterans. There had been a revolutionary war that ousted the White racist regime, and Mugabe had led the war, so he was a revolutionary war hero. He was also a Black power guy along the lines of Mandela. The war veterans wanted land, and Mugabe kept saying it was coming. But the US and UK kept putting more and more sanctions on. Mugabe kept telling them that if they did not let him buy out those farmers, he could not hold his supporters back forever, and at some point, they would just go grab the land themselves. Mugabe kept urging peace with his supporters. Well, at some point the war veterans had enough and they invaded all of the White farms. Nothing much happened. The Whites mostly took off and only The Blacks were fine at small farming, but they could not run big farms. So like complete idiots, they simply dismantled the White farms and took everything they could. So the farms were left nonoperational, stripped of equipment, and the Blacks could not run the farms. So now there were food problems. Mugabe knew that the Blacks could not run those large farms, and he always wanted to do this in an orderly way. He saw the whole mess as catastrophic and stupid. But it was his supporters who raided the farms, so he felt that he had to cheer them on, which is what he did, though he didn’t really want to do that. The project was more to have the state take over the farms in some way because it was assumed that the state could figure out how to run them, or even hire the Whites back to run farms for the people. The White farmers never got paid off. A lot of the Whites stayed, and nothing happened to them. Now a lot of the Whites are coming back because Mugabe says you can farm your own lands, but we own them now, and you have to lease the land from the state. I think you have to grow food for the people too. And I think a lot of the Blacks are small farmers now. The situation is fixing itself. The government is socialist and dedicated to helping the people, which is the main reason we in the West hate them. Mugabe has not been nice to the opposition, but they are in bed with the US, UK and the West. Their project is neoliberalism. They lack majority support because nobody wants this crap, and the Opposition basically fronts for the US and the UK. Most people see them as traitors and carpetbaggers. Mugabe is still a patriotic hero. The opposition has maybe 3 There was a big deal about Mugabe tearing down some neighborhoods where a lot of Opposition supporters lived. He called it Operation Tear Down Trash. It was not handled well. The West lied, went crazy and said that Mugabe was tearing down all the homes of the Opposition people, leaving them homeless. But this was not true. The operation was done in a mean way, but their homes were shantytowns, and Mugabe tore down their shantytowns and built a lot of much better, decent modern state housing. Then he invited the former residents, many Opposition people, to come live in the new houses. People stuck with Mugabe all the way. The sanctions ruined the economy because they were locked out of the world banking system. This was all done for some racist bullshit that the UK wanted to let 2,000 White farmers continue to monopolize the land and create a system of gross injustice. The British acted very bad in this case, and their behavior was quite racist. We shamefully went along with them. The US and UK media wrote the situation up in a disgusting racist way which basically said that the Blacks destroyed the White farms and were now hungry because niggers are so dumb they can’t even grow food and they need superior White people to even grow food for them so they don’t starve. Yep that’s how dumb niggers are. That was the actual subtext of the West’s reporting on this case, and the openly racist tone was disgusting for the supposedly nonracist Western media. Anyway it’s not true that niggers are so stupid they can’t even grow food. Blacks have been growing food in Africa forever, and they even started plantation agriculture in East Africa 900 years ago. They also excelled at animal husbandry for thousands of years. Granted Blacks mostly ran small farms, but they were generally able to grow enough food to survive. How hard is it to grow food? The Papuans grow yams and raise pigs. It’s not real hard to do. You don’t have to be a genius to do it. Any human can do this. However, Blacks never got good at running large modern farms which are run more like a good-sized business. You need higher education, accounting skills and a lot of others smart brain skills to run large farms. It’s almost like running a big factory, or harder. There are still Whites in Zimbabwe. I watched a video recently of downtown Harare. Crowded parking lot, lot of Blacks but some Whites, everyone dressed nicely, nice cars. They went into a nice restaurant where there were Blacks and Whites both in there, and everything was cool. Apparently a number of Blacks have some money, and there are still moneyed Whites there. If you have some money, it does looks like a nice place to live. You go to downtown Harare on a weekday afternoon, and there are workers in office clothes eating lunch in the park. There’s a brand new fancy radiology center that Mugabe built. Most people are pretty chill and laid back. You can go to the slums which are not great, but I would say that Harare has the least bad slums in all of Africa. The slums are state housing, and the state spends a lot of money on the people. This just goes to show you that people would rather stand in misery than die on their knees in comfort. It was very bad under Mugabe due to sanctions, but he represented African pride and self-determination against the predatory West that was trying to screw them over. It was like the Blacks not wanting to live under White rule in South Africa or the Palestinians not wanting to live under Israeli rule. People have pride, and idiots who think humans are only about money are wrong. Not all people are capitalist hogs who worship money. A lot of people will take poverty with pride over more stuff and living in indignity under people who think you are inferior. The West can’t seem to figure out that humans have pride and don’t want to be lorded over by those who act superior to them. You can’t even buy people off to live under supremacist rule as inferiors. The West doesn’t get it because our only value is money, and we can’t see how many humans will gladly trade money for pride and prefer poverty over being ruled by condescending supremacists.

The Lie of the 20 (or 40, or 60, or 80, or 110) Million: How Many People Did Stalin Kill?

Here. In 1991, after the Soviet archives were opened, a wild debate raged in the journals for many years. The subject of the debate was how many people did Joseph Stalin kill. Most people assume that Joseph Stalin killed 20 million people at the very least. That figure is considered unassailable. Other figures of 40-60 million are considered to also be possible. The fascist hero and traitor Solzhenitsyn said that Stalin killed 110 million people. We have little data about how many were killed by early Bolsheviks in peacetime. Much of their time was spent in a brutal Civil War and there were many deaths associated with that. There was also a brutal famine that occurred in the context of war. But all indications are that the Leninists were not responsible for a lot of deaths. I would be surprised if they killed 100,000 people in 10 years. From 1926-1953, we have readily accessible data however.

                     Deaths
Executions           900,000
Anti-Kulak Campaign  400,000
Gulag                1,200,000
Total                2,500,000

I am leaving out deaths during wartime here, as we should not be counting those. However, there were some serious population transfers during World War which ended about 10 years later. The death tolls from these transfers were very high. Populations in the Baltics, Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush and other Caucasian people were transferred, sometimes en masse, to gulags in Siberia. Death tolls were extremely high. I am not sure whether to include these totals, so I am leaving them out. Anyway, I do not have a good source for the deaths. Surely there were executions and deaths in the gulags after 1943, but after Stalin died, the system was very much loosened up under Khrushchev and certainly under his followers. I doubt once again if there were 100,000 people killed between 1953-1989, a 36 year period. I am also leaving off deaths due to famines because there is no evidence that these famines were artificially engineered. The most famous fake famine of all, the fake Holodomor, simply never even happened. What I mean was, yes, there was a famine, and many people died – 5.4 million in fact. But those deaths were not all in the Ukraine. Many died in the cities and 1 million died in Siberia. The death toll was higher in the fanatically pro-Stalin Volga than it was in Western Ukraine. Even in Ukraine, the deaths were as high in the pro-Stalin East as in the anti-USSR nationalist West and Center. There is simply no evidence whatsoever that any “terror famine” occurred at all. There was simply a famine that occurred for a variety of causes, mostly a simple harvest collapse. Most died of disease instead of starvation. Much of the death toll was due to the kulaks. The kulaks killed 5 There was an armed revolution in the Ukraine with 20-30 armed attacks per day. Collective farms were attacked and set on fire. Workers in the collective farms would be shot and the women would be raped. This went on all through the years around the famine. The state crackdown was very brutal and that is why I listed 400,000 deaths during this time. If you want to count those 400,000 as “Holodomor” deaths, be my guest. But it ain’t no 6 million and there was no terror famine. Look, if anti-Communists want to go on and on about Stalin killing 2 1/2 million people, please knock yourselves out. But they’ll never do that because it’s not sensational enough. You say the phrase “20 million killed in Communism” and everyone sits up and takes notice. You say Stalin killed 2 million and most will yawn and ask, “That’s all?” and turn back to the TV show. This crap is all about propaganda. It’s not about real history or social science of any of that. It’s about lying for political purposes, which is what most of modern history is anyway. How shameful that is.

"Old-Fashioned Pig Farming," by Alpha Unit

Woodlands are a pig’s natural habitat. But pigs are adaptable to just about any environment. They live on every continent (except Antarctica).

In the forests and woodlands where wild pigs live, trees and vegetation provide them with shelter and their preferred foods. They like places where they’ll have year-round access to water and moist ground for wallowing, such as swamps and marshes.

In spring they graze on grasses and clover. Throughout the year they’ll forage for berries, nuts, acorns, mushrooms, insects, and sometimes small rodents. But one thing a pig was designed to do is root. A pig’s snout allows it to navigate and interact with its environment – sort of like a cat’s whiskers.

The nasal disc of a pig’s snout, while rigid enough to be used for digging, has numerous sensory receptors. In addition to being useful as a fine and powerful tool for manipulating objects, the extensive innervation in the snout provides pigs with an extremely well-developed sense of smell.

Pigs can smell roots and tubers that are deep underground and in the wild can spend up to 75 percent of their day rooting and foraging. Some homesteaders put pigs’ rooting instinct to work for them and use pigs to “till” garden plots.

Daniel MacPhee and his wife use Guinea Hog piglets on their New England farm, but unlike some farmers, they don’t plan to eat their pigs.

Instead, the piglets are meant as an environmentally- and -budget-friendly cleanup crew of sorts, rooting around to clean out tough, tangled roots after a small flock of sheep has grazed at the couple’s farm, Blackbird Rise in Palermo [Maine]. By having the animals do the work, “we’re not buying machinery and we’re not wasting fossil fuels,” said MacPhee, 35. “They’re eating the roots and vegetable matter, processing that and putting nutrients back in the soil through manure. They’re doing all the same things a tractor does but without the environmental impact.”

The Guinea Hogs on their farm are a “heritage breed,” the name given to any of the distinct breeds that can be traced back to the period before industrial farming. Generations ago, there were hundreds of pig breeds on homesteads in Europe and the United States. But a lot of the historic breeds fell out of favor as the pork industry moved toward leaner carcasses and began large-scale confinement operations. This was in part the result of corn production.

As the larger settled farms of the Midwest began to produce excess corn, the availability and low cost of this feed attracted pig production and processing to the region. By the mid-1800s the states that produced the most corn also produced the most pigs, and production declined in the East and New England. The industry was becoming geographically centralized as well and the number of breeds of pigs began to decline. Several breeds became extinct by the early 1900s.

Pigs are for the most part no longer produced and sold by independent producers on open markets. Since the late 20th century, pig production in the United States has come to be dominated by a few large, vertically-integrated corporations that control every step along the way from the selection of breeding stock to the retailing of pork. A lot of the farmers who are still in the business are contract growers for the corporations. But there are independent pig farmers who are dedicated to bringing back the old breeds and are raising them in the traditional way, on pasture and in woodlands.

Some heritage breeds are very rare and are listed as critically endangered by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. Among heritage breeds is the very popular Berkshire pig, a black pig designated “first class”. Farmers say that Berkshires have an excellent disposition and are very friendly and curious.

The Tamworth is a golden-red pig and a direct descendant of the wild boars that roamed the forests of Staffordshire. They are considered very outdoorsy and athletic. (They make the best bacon in the United States, according to some fans.)

The Large Black retains the traits of its ancestors that lived on the pastures and woods of England in the 16th and 17th centuries. They are hardy animals that can withstand cold and heat. They are well-known as docile hogs.

The Hereford is a medium-size pig that is unique to the United States. Its name is inspired by its striking color pattern of intense red with white trim, the same as that of Hereford cattle. These pigs also have a reputation for being easy-going.

The Red Wattle is especially in danger of extinction. It is a large red hog with a fleshy wattle attached to each side of the neck. These pigs are very hardy with an especially mild temperament.

There are other heritage breeds, some of which number as low as a few hundred worldwide. Heritage pig farmers want to increase demand for their breeds, because to eat them is to preserve them, they say. There is, in fact, a growing market for heritage pork, which is more tender and tastes much better than mass-produced pork. Just looking at a cut of heritage pork you see a striking difference. It’s typically darker than pork from industrial farms, some as red as beef.

Of course, there are heritage pig farmers like the MacPhees, who just like having pigs on the farm, performing those unique tasks that pigs do.

If you’ve got children, there are heritage pig breeds they would easily get along with. Brian Wright raises heritage pigs and says that some are considered docile while others are seen as “evil, killer hogs” – in other words, very aggressive. You’ve got to do your homework before picking a breed.

The Rossi Farm in Rhode Island began breeding Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs several years ago and the pigs have become a favorite. Nicknamed Orchard Hogs, these pigs originally foraged for windfall apples and are distinguished by the black spots on their white coats. The Rossis say Gloucestershire Old Spots are extremely friendly and laid-back. When the pigs are in the pasture, the children are often out there with them. And the pigs love having their ears scratched by the kids.

Crime: Eating a Hamburger. Punishment: Death Penalty

Man eats a hamburger. Outraged mob beats him to death for this heinous crime. Government defends the mob who beat the poor sod to the death.

India a such a wonderful modern country!

India…is a shithole. Bears repeating.

There Is No Such Thing As the Holodomor

Stary Wylk writes:

The Holodomor was starving Ukrainians through crop seizure, not mass deportations. Those came later.

The Holodomor never even happened. And murderous deportations were indeed part of the process that killed many people in that region in 1932.

The starvation was just as bad as in the Ukraine if not worse in a number of other places including the Lower Volga and western Kazakhstan. The Kazakhs supported Stalin, and the Russians of the Rostov were fanatical Stalin supporters. Also the Holodomor hit the east of the Ukraine where the Russians live very hard. Support for Stalin was and is still strong in this area. 1 million people died in Siberia. There were a lot of deaths in Moscow. Did Stalin unleash a “terror famine” in Eastern Ukraine, the Rostov, the Lower Don, western Kazakhstan, Siberia and even Moscow? Of course not.

There was no terror famine. There was a famine harvest. In one year, the harvest collapsed and was only 5

You can argue why that happened.

Crops had to be seized because the Ukies were setting their crops on fire and piling them in the fields to get rained on until they molded. The kulaks killed half the livestock in the USSR in the years leading up to the Holodomor. This made things worse, as there was a shortage of horses to plow fields and livestock to eat.

Also the Ukies waged an insurgency where they were attacking the collective farms, burning crops, killing livestock and raping and murdering collective farm workers. At the height there were 20-30 attacks a day going on. All of this was going on in the context of the Holodomor. Actually many deaths occurred in the context of a vicious counterinsurgency campaign combined with some very cruel mass deportations of Ukies to Siberia. 390,000 Ukrainians were killed in this savage counterinsurgency/deportation campaign. If you want to add that to Stalin’s kill total, I would not object.

Ukraine suffered the most deaths, but that was where the harvest collapse was worst. 9

There was no terror famine!

Wikipedia on Mao

Repost from the old site. Granted, he’s a controversial fellow all right, but this hit piece is just an outrageous travesty of anti-Communist propaganda. The discussion page shows the details of the travesty, including the banning of anyone promoting an opposite point of view (a typical smarmy Wikipedia “Neutral Point of View” practice). My 1990 World Book article on China< and my Time-Life book, China, from 1962 (height of the Cold War) are vastly more fair than this. World Book is hardly pro-Communist and Time-Life was always fanatically anti-Communist. Fact is, Wikipedia is run by a bunch of little libertarian shits. Jimmy Wales is a wild-eyed, fanatical libertarian crazy person, and he’s using his evil website to try to poison the mind of a planet in favor of his libertarian nightmare. That’s his right, but the US “free press” (there is no free press in the US) really ought to call him on it. I’ve seen all sorts of MSM bullshit about Jimmy and his jerk-off webcyclopedia, and every single one of them has been a fawning valentine (as we call such pieces in the journalism field). Never once has even one article hinted that Wikipedia is grossly unfair, or that it is run by various cabals that are all tied in with the super-cabal of ultra-right libertarian Hindutva-Zionists around Wales. It might be nice to let the world know exactly what the politics of him and his creepy followers really are. Let them know that Wales was furious that the federal government had done anything whatsoever to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina before, during and after the storm in any way whatsoever. Can you imagine? In Wales World, there is no role for a government to play in a world-class hurricane. Need to be rescued? Call your friend who obviously has a helicopter, or pay $1000’s for some Israeli-cum-Halliburton mercenaries to come rescue your ass. No government help to put up victims afterwards, to clean up the mess, or even to collect the fucking bodies. Let the epidemics come. No government help to rebuild the city afterwards. Let it stay underwater oozing gators, toxic waste, mold, decaying flesh and ruined structures. All of this is the proper domain of the private sector! Can you imagine how many people would have died? I mean, this is what we got anyway under Libertarian Lite George Bush, but in Jimmy World, things would have been incalculably worse. Look. If that’s Jimmy’s worldview, no problem. Hell, there are still dedicated Pol Potists out there. But the world really ought to know what Jimmy Wales’ fanatical ultra political views are so they can decide whether or not they agree. They should also be told how he uses his fake unbiased Webcyclopedia like Rupert Murdoch uses his media empire, to push reactionary politics in the name of “fair and balanced” bullshit. That the “liberal media” MSM refuses to do this is worrying. It makes me wonder how reactionary they really are. Is the MSM as ultra-right as Wales, or are they just scared to talk about it? What’s up?

Notes

1. Here is some text from my World Book article on China. Note how the very rightwing World Book encyclopedia is able to acknowledge that Mao did many great things: The Communist government has achieved an impressive record of economic growth. The Communists have provided widespread job opportunities, job security and a more even income distribution to the workers…China’s farm output has expanded greatly under the Communists…Production of chickens and livestock has improved significantly since 1950… Under the Communists, industrial production has grown at an average rate of 1 All of the Communists’ health programs have resulted in a population that is much healthier than before. The Communists have almost wiped out cholera, typhoid and many other horrible diseases that used to kill millions of Chinese every year.

Cow Farts Cause More Global Warming Than Humans?

Repost from the old site. The latest rightwing crap. I was on a rightwing blog a couple of years ago and decided to ask how many believed in global warming. The vast majority did not. A few said it was happening, but it was natural. One or two said it was happening, but no one knew what was causing it, and we needed to study it more. This blog has unfortunately become infested lately with some young White male 20-something reactionary-to-libertarian trolls who are lurking in the comments section. It’s quite simple to be a libertarian when you are young, dumb and full of cum. I voted Libertarian at age 22. I’d never do it again, but that’s how you learn. People that age just haven’t been fucked hard enough and enough times by life yet. By the time we are 40, most of us have had about a million horrible things happen to us, and narcissism is on sharp decline. That’s why age and wisdom are traditionally synonymous. They’re causing a lot of dissension, but echo chambers are boring. Comments rules forbid me from banning folks based on ideology, so for the moment, they are sticking around. It’s kind of interesting to have some pet rightwingers to play with, because like a lot of pets, they do a lot of stupid shit. Since rightwingers can talk unlike all other pets, rightwingers also say stupid shit. Debating rightwingers is like debating ultranationalist Jewish Zionists. Most of their arguments are absolute crap. The reason is because what they are arguing for is perfectly horrible to most folks. Hence I really admire Zionists like Samson Blinded who just tell it like it is. I admire libertarians like Entitled to an Opinion who just lay it out in all of libertarianism’s heartless nastiness. Plus TGGP and Obaidah Shoher and really bright guys, and I have to admire that, if they are pushing something pretty awful. Since conservatism and Zionism are unpalatable to most folks as they actually exist, conservatives and Zionists always have to lie to try to get decent people to go along with their programs, which most folks find repellent. Anyway, it looks like the rightwing has moved on on global warming. Only But the new line is that global warming exists, but it’s not caused by people, it’s caused by cow farts! Well, if that were so, as a totalitarian, I would just say fine, so kill all the cows, serve the whole world steak for a month and be done with it. If that’s too radical, make a beef hamburger at McDonald’s cost twice what a chicken or turkey hamburger does. Soon every fast food joint has beef and non-beef options and profits are blasting right along. This rightwing argument, like most of them, is ultimately devious. The rightwingers know that this hamburger-munching Americans will never tax their beloved burgers even one penny. So they throw up their hands and say nothing can be done, especially about reducing auto emissions, which is really what they have their butts smoking about anyway. How dare you order me to ride a bike! Cow farts cause global warming, so what business do we have trying to reduce car emissions? Let global warming continue apace. Problem is that they are playing games with figures. It is true that the cattle industry, in the totality of its effects, does account for 1 If cow burping and farting is only 1 One would think that any livestock or animal husbandry is as capable of producing this problem as any other. Not so. Cattle cause the overwhelming majority of the global warming from animal husbandry. Therefore, we could continue to eat meat, but just switch from beef to lamb, turkey, chicken, pork, goat, etc. I’d love to turn a lot of the cattle lands on the Great Plains back to buffalo and then harvest them for food. We had great herds of buffalo roaming our Midwest for thousands of years with no problems for the ecosystem and no global warming issues. I am told that rabbits are an excellent food. A great way to do this would just be to tax beef and probably even milk based on the amount of damage it does to the ecosystem. My brother (I won’t go near the place) informs me that hamburgers at McDonald’s cost from $1-4. Double the price. Make them cost $2-8 instead of $1-4, as I mentioned above. It’s probably politically impossible, but that’s why I have totalitarian tendencies. Cattle also cause a tremendous amount of other damage above and beyond global warming. I will just let the article summarize:

Livestock also produces more than 100 other polluting gases, including more than two-thirds of the world’s emissions of ammonia, one of the main causes of acid rain. Ranching, the report adds, is “the major driver of deforestation” worldwide, and overgrazing is turning a fifth of all pastures and ranges into desert. Cows also soak up vast amounts of water: it takes a staggering 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk. Wastes from feedlots and fertilisers used to grow their feed overnourish water, causing weeds to choke all other life. And the pesticides, antibiotics and hormones used to treat them get into drinking water and endanger human health. The pollution washes down to the sea, killing coral reefs and creating “dead zones” devoid of life. One is up to 21,000 sq km, in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of the waste from US beef production is carried down the Mississippi. The report concludes that, unless drastic changes are made, the massive damage done by livestock will more than double by 2050, as demand for meat increases.

사 동물 하나 분쇄기

[wpvideo Gv94o4L4]

I am looking for translators to translate this post into Spanish, Polish and Finnish. Email me if you are interested.

This post has been translated into Italian as Quattro Animali, Un Macinatore (traduzione in Italiano) and into French as Quatre Animaux, Un Broyeur (en Français).

Hello folks, this is a Korean translation of Four Animals, One Grinder. The translator was 미피캣. I don’t even know this person yet,but I am very grateful to them for this translation as this post is quite popular!

I am going to keep on publishing this video until WordPress tells me to take it down. I am not sure if it is ok with them or not, but they have not told me to take it down yet, so up it stays.

첫 번째 동물은 소, 두 번째는 돼지, 세 번째도 소, 그리고 마지막은 말입니다.

믿 을 수 없는 비디오입니다. 이곳의 나머지 동영상과 마찬가지로 굉장히 무섭습니다. 끔찍하지만 뭐 사는 게 그렇죠. 영상은 육류 폐기장치를 계속 비출 뿐입니다.죽은 가축이 리프터로 들어 올려져 폐기장치로 떨궈집니다. 그리고 뼈, 머리, 내장 등등, 모조리 갈려버립니다.

인터넷에서는 소는 살아있다는 말이 돌고 있지만 사실이 아닙니다.분쇄기가 돌려질 때 움직이는 것처럼 보이는데, 칼날 때문인 것이죠.

또 다른 오해는 이 갈아진 동물들이 핫도그 등의 음식에 쓰인다는 것입니다. 물론 사실이 아닙니다.

본 영상의 동물은 농장에서 늙어 죽은 가축들입니다. 저렇게 갈려진 고기들이 사료(특히 닭)나 펫 푸드로 간다고도 하는데, 딱히 틀린 말은 아닙니다(광우병도 이런 이유로 일어났죠). 펫 푸드로 쓰인다고 하면 좀 찜찜하군요. 다시는 개 사료를 먹지 않겠습니다.

제 생각엔 저렇게 갈려진 고기들은 비료로 쓰일 것 같습니다. 또는 기계에 바르는 윤활유 등의 기름을 만드는 데 갈 것 같군요. 또 비누로 만들어지기도 할 것입니다.

많은 사람이 농장에서 가축이 어떤 식으로 죽는가에 대해 잘 알지 못합니다. 죽은 말이나 소, 돼지를 어떻게 처리하는가? 아마도 쓰레기 수거업자에게 맡겨 땅에 파묻는다고 생각할 것입니다. 그렇지만 소나 말을 파묻는 무덤은 있지도 않을뿐더러, 소각로에서 태우는 것도 허용되지 않습니다. 바로 이런 이유로 육류 폐기장치가 사용됩니다.

저 공장 부근에 사는 사람이 증언하듯이, 저 폐기장치에서 나오는 냄새는 굉장히 끔찍합니다. 리프트 차를 움직이는 일은 아마도 이 나라의 가장 더러운 직업일 것입니다. 저 분쇄기를 씻어내는 걸 상상해본 적 있습니까? 굉장히 끔찍합니다.

마지막 장면에서 말이 갈아지는 장면은 특히 굉장합니다. 특히 뼈와 두개골이 부서지는 소리가 압권입니다. 와우!

두 번째 소(2:11)가 갈아지면서 어떤 액체가 강하게 뿜어져 나오는 장면도 굉장합니다. 아마도 저 소는 많은 가축이 그렇듯이 고창증으로 죽어 꽤 오랫동안 방치되어 있던 것 같습니다. 이 고기들이 음식으로 쓰이지 않는 이유죠.

저 비디오가 촬영된 것은 몇 년 전이지만, 화제가 된 것은 최근 2009년 8월 중순부터입니다.

인터넷에서 저런 영상을 볼 수 있다는 게 놀랍지 않습니까?

앨 고어가 인터넷을 발명하지 않았더라면 그 누가 분쇄기가 돌아가는 장면을 알 수 있었겠습니까.

이 분쇄장치는 덴마크제이며, 제품명은 PB 30/60 Crusher입니다.

Quattro Animali, Un Macinatore

[wpvideo Gv94o4L4] I am looking for translators to translate this post into Spanish, Polish and Finnish. Email me if you are interested. This post has been translated into French as Quatre Animaux, Un Broyeur (en Français). This is an Italian translation of Four Animals One Grinder by “Natalie From France.” Il primo animale è una mucca, il secondo un maiale, il terzo una mucca, e l’ultimo un cavallo. Il video non è proprio raccapricciante o catastrofico come la maggior parte degli altri filmati presenti nel blog. E’ abbastanza difficile da guardare. Si vede quello che succede in un centro di raccolta e macinazione di carcasse animali. Il bestiame morto è spinto da un montacarichi verso il macinatore, poi viene tritato da questo apparecchio incredibile: ossa, teste, zoccoli e tutto il resto. Ci sono un sacco di articoli in internet che sostengono che le mucche sono vive. Non è vero. sembrano vive soltanto quando il macinatore si mette in moto; in realtà si muovono a causa dell’enorme potenza dell’apparecchio. Un’altra idea errata è che gli animali tritati siano destinati all’alimentazione umana, per produrre hot dogs per esempio. Non è vero. Si tratta di animali morti in azienda agricola, e quindi impropri al consumo. Certe persone sostengono che i prodotti derivati dalla macinazione delle carcasse potrebbero essere destinati all’alimentazione animale (pollame) oppure per l’alimentazione degli animali domestici. Non è un pensiero gradevole, in effetti questo tipo di “riciclaggio” è la causa dell’apparizione del morbo della mucca pazza. L’idea che tutto questo finisca nella ciottola dei nostri animali di compagnia mi spezza il cuore. Davvero. Non mangero’ mai più crocchette per cani. Penso che di solito gli animali finiscano come fertilizzante, il che rappresenta un metodo inoffensivo di utilizzarli. Si produce pure del grasso animale per motori. Si riesce anche a fare del sapone di questa purè di cavallo (Mr Ed nel testo, ndt). La gente non si rende conto che il bestiame muore ogni giorno, particolarmente nelle moderne aziende agricole. Non ci si pensa mai, ma come fare per smaltire cavalli, mucche e maiali morti ? Non si puo’ mica depositarli nel cassonetto. E’ difficile scavare un buco per seppellirli. Non esistono cimiteri per mucche e cavalli, e gli inceneritori non li accettano. Ed è qui che entra in ballo il centro di smaltimento carcasse animali. Immagino che si vende l’animale morto al centro di smaltimento, gli addetti vengono a prenderlo. Lo portano al centro e lo macinano per produrre fertilizzante o qualcosa di simile. In questi centri l’odore è insopportabile, come lo attestano le persone che abitano in prossimità. Il tizio che si occupa del montacarichi ha sicuramente il peggior lavoro del paese. Pensate al tizio che pulisce il macinatore. Guardate il disordine. Alla fine il montacarichi butta un cavallo nell’apparecchio, è incredibile…il rumore del macinatore gigantesco quando trita le ossa e i crani. Wow ! C’è una sequenza particolamente sgradevole, alla seconda mucca (2’11) si vede un getto enorme dalla carcassa mentre viene tritata. Significa che l’animale è andato in decomposizione durante abbastanza tempo, ed è gonfiato. E’ un’altra delle ragioni per le quali la carne è impropria al consumo. Questo video era disponibile in rete da qualche anno, ma da metà agosto risquote un gran successo. Esiste un’incredibile quantità di roba da guardare in internet. Prima di Al Gore, chi di voi aveva già visto funzionare un centro di smaltimento carcasse ? La società che produce questo macinatore si trova in Danimarca. Pensate un po’ alla tecnologia adoperata in questo apparecchio. Si chiama PB 30/40 Crusher. Alcuni pensieri: Sarebbe un aggeggio fantastico per l’applicazione della pena di morte ! Basta con l’iniezione letale ! Omicidio premeditato ? Condannato al macinatore ! Si potrebbero vendere i biglietti per una bella cifra, la gente verrebbe a vedere il condannato frullato vivo. Il ricavato andrebbe nelle casse dello Stato, così lo Stato potrebbe adoperare questi soldi per aiutare i cittadini. Un macinatore lo voglio anch’io !!!! Dove posso comprarlo ? Mi piacerebbe adoperarlo contro qualche nemico. Lo legherei, lo butterei sulla rampa di carico e me ne sbarazzerei nel Macinatore. Poi incasserei 1000 dollari a spettatore e me ne andrei con il ricavato. Si dovrebbe adoperare questa macchina per tritare gli esseri umani. Cosi’ potremmo salvare tanto spazio cimiteriale, ed adoperare le aree dei futuri cimiteri per costruire supermercati e altre cose altrettanto indispensabili. Attualmente penso che quando moriro’, desidero essere frullato cosi’. Si potrebbe organizzare un funerale, con invitati che guardano mentre mi faccio tritare, mangiando pop corn e cose simili. Una volta tritato desidero diventare scatolame col nome “Robert Lindsay Kitekat” ed essere dato in pasto al mio gattino, supponendo che ne abbia uno. Se non ho un gatto voglio comunque essere trasformato in cibo per gatti, perchè li amo. Così i gatti festeggieranno mangiando qualcuno che li ha amati con tutto il cuore. I gatti mi hanno dato cosi tanto amore in vita mia e questa sarebbe la mia maniera tutta speciale di tornarglielo. C’é un rock brutale, mortale e metallico come sottofonodo, vero ? Sarebbe divertente vedere un elefante morto o una giraffa, buttati nel macinatore, tanto per farci quattro risate… Nel mio paese dei sogni ci sarebbe la tele con 600 canali via cavo. Un canale chiamato “tele-macinatoio” mostrerebbe l’apparecchio in funzione tutto il giorno. Per rendere i programmi più interessanti, si potrebbe macinare ogni sorta di animali. Guarderei la tele tutto il giorno, mentre lavoro, anche come sottofondo. Cambierei canale all’ora dei pasti. Ci sono molte possibilità d’impiego per questo apparecchio. Si potrebbe prendere un bambino Bianco obeso, cresciuto da una madre single a forza di Twinkies e videogiochi, per metterlo sotto il macinatore. La carne trita cadrebbe intorno a lui, sul suo viso, ricoprendolo interamente. Gli operai spalerebbero la carne in modo da evitare di seppellirlo. Potrebbe tenere la bocca aperta, la carne cadrebbe dentro, facendolo diventare sempre più grasso. Dopo dieci anni di questa “dieta” sarebbe cosi’ grasso che potrebbe diventare il Re della Germania. Si potrebbe tritare il bestiame e darlo a Disney. Disney potrebbe ricostituire gli animali in esseri umani, in particolare le star preferite dai teen agers Selena, Miley e Britney. Ci vorrà poco tempo ai fan isterici per rendersi conto che il loro idolo era un cavallo macinato. Si potrebbe adoperare il macinatore per tentare di risolvere i conflitti impossibili da risolvere. Macinando mucche e maiali, riprendendo le immagini e distribuendone i film nelle zone di guerra potremmo far progredire il conflitto indo musulmano in Cachemire. Le possibilità sono infinite !

Quatre Animaux, Un Broyeur

[wpvideo Gv94o4L4] I am looking for translators to translate this post into Spanish, Polish and Finnish. Email me if you are interested. This post has been translated into Italian as Quattro Animali, Un Macinatore (traduzione in Italiano). Hi folks, this is a French translation of 4 Animals, 1 Grinder , a post I made a while back. Regular readers feel free to watch it, unless you don’t like gross stuff. No bad reactions have been recorded so far other than temporary loss of appetite. Translation by Natalie From France, one kickass translator. She also translates to Italian too, believe it or not. She was brought up by French-speaking parents in Trieste, Italy. There is an old French population there happens to include a lot of the city’s elite upper class. I’m not sure of their history. Le premier animal est une vache, le second un cochon, le troisième une autre vache, et le dernier un cheval. Je n’en crois pas mes yeux, ce n’est pas vraiment horrible ou catastrophique comme la majeure partie des autres vidéos ici. C’est assez brut, mais c’est la vie mec. Cela nous montre ce qui se passe dans un centre d’équarrissage. Tout le bétail mort est poussé vers un broyeur par un ascenseur puis broyé par cette machine incroyable : os, têtes, sabots et tout le reste. Un tas d’articles sur le Net affirment que ces vaches sont vivantes. Ce n’est pas vrai. Elles paraissent vivantes seulement quand le broyeur se met en marche ; en fait, elles bougent dans tous les sens à cause de la puissance de l’appareil. Une autre idée fausse est que les animaux sont mixés et destinés à l’alimentation humaine, comme les hot dogs par exemple. C’est faux. Ce sont des animaux qui sont morts à la ferme, donc ils sont sûrement impropres à la consommation (humaine). Certaines personnes affirment que les produits de l’équarrissage pourraient être destinés à l’alimentation animale (en particulier pour les poulets) ou pour l’alimentation des animaux de compagnie, ce n’est pas une pensée agréable (en effet c’est la cause de la maladie de la vache folle)…L’idée que tout ceci finisse dans la gamelle de nos animaux de compagnie me fait de la peine. Si, c’est vrai. Je ne mangerai plus jamais de croquettes pour chien. Je pense que d’habitude les animaux broyés finissent en engrais, ce qui est une façon inoffensive de les utiliser. On produit aussi de la graisse animale, pour les moteurs. On en fait même du savon de cette purée de cheval. (purée de Mr Ed dans le texte original ndt) Les gens ne se rendent pas compte que le bétail meurt tous les jours, en particulier dans les exploitations modernes. Ils n’y pensent jamais mais…comment se débarrasser des chevaux, vaches et cochons morts ? Vous ne pouvez pas les déposer au coin de la rue pour les éboueurs. Et il n’est pas facile de les enterrer dans un trou. Nous n’avons pas de cimetière pour vaches et chevaux, et les incinérateurs ne les acceptent pas. C’est là qu’intervient le centre d’équarrissage. J’imagine que l’on vend la carcasse à l’usine d’équarrissage, qui vous envoie du personnel pour emporter l’animal. Ils le ramènent à l’usine, le broient et en font du compost ou autre chose. Une chose que vous devriez savoir à propos de ces centres d’équarrissage est que l’odeur y est nauséabonde, comme l’affirment les riverains. Le gars qui s’occupe du monte charge doit avoir le pire boulot de ce pays. Imaginez-vous à la place de ce gars qui doit nettoyer le broyeur. C’est un sacré désordre. À la fin le monte charge jette un cheval dans l’appareil, regarder cet appareil en train de broyer est incroyable. Ce qui m’a soufflé, c’est le bruit de ce mixeur géant quand il hache les os et les crânes. Super ! Il y a un passage assez désagréable, lors de la deuxième vache (2’11 dans la vidéo) où la carcasse laisse échapper un énorme jet, pendant qu’elle est broyée. Cela signifie que l’animal est resté en décomposition pendant un certain temps et a gonflé. C’est une autre raison pour laquelle cette viande est impropre à la consommation humaine. Cette vidéo était disponible depuis quelques années, mais depuis la mi-aoùt 2009 elle cartonne ! Il y a une incroyable quantité de choses que l’on peut regarder sur Internet. Avant Al Gore, combien d’entre nous avaient déjà vu une usine d’équarrissage en action ? La société qui produit cet appareil se trouve au Danemark. Pensez à la technologie employée dans cet engin. Il s’appelle le PB 30/60 Crusher. Quelques considérations: Ça pourrait quand même être une super machine pour appliquer la peine de mort ! Fini cette connerie d’injection létale. Meurtre au premier degré? Je vous condamne au broyeur! On pourrait vendre des tickets pour une coquette somme, pour que les spectateurs viennent voir le meurtrier qui se fait mouliner vivant. On pourrait ensuite utiliser les bénéfices pour aider les caisses de l’état, ainsi l’état pourrait dépenser l’argent pour aider les gens. Je veux une de ces machines ! Où est-ce que je peux en acheter une ? J’aimerais m’en servir pour quelques uns de mes ennemies. Je les ficellerais, je les jetterais sur la rampe de chargement et m’en débarrasserais dans le Broyeur. Puis j’encaisserais 1000 euros par spectateur, deviendrais riche et me barrerais avec la recette. Nous devrions utiliser cet appareil sur les êtres humains pour les broyer. De cette façon nous pourrions sauver pas mal de place dans les cimetières et utiliser l’espace de futurs cimetières pour construire des épiceries, des supermarchés et autres choses indispensables. À présent, je pense que quand je mourrai, je souhaiterais être broyé de cette façon. On pourrait le faire sous forme d’enterrement, et tous les invités pourraient regarder pendant que je suis haché, en grignotant du pop corn et d’autres trucs. Après avoir été haché je souhaiterais être mis en boite de conserve sous le nom “Robert Lindsay Pâtée” et donné à mon chaton, en supposant que j’en ai un. Si je n’ai pas de chat je demanderais à devenir de la nourriture pour chat, parce que je les aime. De cette façon les chats feraient un festin avec quelqu’un qui les aime vraiment. Les chats m’ont donné tant d’amour dans ma vie que cela serait ma manière tout à fait spéciale de le leur rendre ! Il ont du avoir un sacré rock brutal, mortel et métallique joué en fond sonore, n’est-ce pas ? Ça serait sympa de voir un éléphant mort ou une girafe jetés dans cette machine, juste pour rire… Dans mes rêves, il y aurait 600 chaînes sur le câble. Une serait « la chaîne de la déchiqueteuse d’animaux ». Cette chaîne montrerait le broyeur en train d’hacher des animaux, toute la journée. Pour rendre les programmes plus intéressants, ils pourraient varier les sortes d’animaux à broyer. J’allumerai la télé durant des heures, en faisant mon travail, même en bruit de fond. Je changerai probablement de chaîne lors du repas. Il existe plein de possibilités d’utilisation de cette machine. Nous pourrions prendre un enfant Blanc obèse , élevé par une mère célibataire avec des Twinkies et des jeux vidéo, et le coller sous la machine. La viande du broyeur à bétail sortirait tout autours de lui et même sur lui. Elle atterrirait sur son visage tout en le recouvrant. Nous aurions des ouvriers avec des pelles, pour lui enlever la viande ainsi il ne serait pas enterré. Il pourrait garder sa bouche ouverte, et un peu de la viande tomberait dedans. Puis il la mangerait. Nous le tiendrions là-dessous, il deviendrait de plus en plus gras. Après 10 ans de ce traitement, il serait si gras qu’il pourrait devenir le Roi d’Allemagne. Nous pourrions mouliner les animaux et les donner à Disney. Disney pourrait les reconstituer en êtres humains, particulièrement en stars préférées des teen-agers Selena, Miley et Britney. En peu de temps les fans hystériques se rendront compte que leur idole était un cheval haché. On pourrait utiliser cet appareil pour tenter de résoudre les conflits insolubles. En broyant des cochons et des vaches, en faisant des films de cela et en les distribuant dans les zones de conflit, peut-être que nous pourrions faire des progrès dans le conflit hindo musulman au Cachemire. Les possibilités sont infinies ! If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Four Animals One Grinder

I decided to move this video over to the video site. Find it here. Välkommen svenska läsare! Detta inlägg är nu tillgänglig på svenska. Klicka här för den svenska versionen. Jag älskar Sverige! I am looking for translators to translate this post into Polish and Dutch. Email me if you are interested. Warning: Rare adverse reactions to this video, including vomiting, have been recorded. Please take appropriate precautions before watching the video. The first animal is a cow, the second one is a pig, the third another cow and the last a horse. I can’t believe this video. It isn’t really horrible or evil. It’s kind of gross, but hey that’s life, man. Mostly it’s just incredible. It just shows what goes on at a rendering plant. Whole dead farm animals are fed into the rendering machine via lifter and then ground up by this unbelievable machine, bones, heads, hooves and all. A lot of posts on the Net are saying that these cows are alive. It’s not true. They just appear to be alive since once the grinder starts, they start moving around a lot due to the incredible force of the thing. Another common misconception is that these animals are being ground up for human food like hot dogs. That’s not true. These are dead animals that died on farms somewhere so they are not really fit for consumption. The result might goes into, among other things, animal feed (especially for chickens) or pet food, and that’s not a pleasant thought (this is how Mad Cow Disease is being caused). The thought that this goes into pet food also bothers me. If it’s true, that does it. I’m never going to eat dog food again. Usually the rendered dead animals are turned into fertilizer, which is a harmless use of them. They also turned into yellow (non-vegetable) oil. That’s used as grease for machinery. They also make soap out of this ground up Mr. Ed Puree. People don’t realize that animals die all the time on farms, especially on modern factory farms. What people never think about is, how do you get rid of dead horses, cows and pigs? You can’t exactly drag them to the curb and leave them there for the garbageman. And it’s kind of hard to bury them in a hole. We don’t have animal graveyards for cows and horses, and incinerators don’t accept them. This is where the rendering plant comes in. You sell the dead animal to the rendering plant, and they come and pick it up for you. They take it back to the plant and grind it up for Mulch N Grow or whatever. One problem with these rendering plants is that the smell emanating from them is truly horrendous, as people who live near them attest. The guy driving that lift must have one of the country’s nastiest jobs. Can you imagine being the guy who has to clean the grinder out? If you look at that thing, it’s a horrible mess. At the end of the video the lift tosses a horse in, and watching that sucker get ground up is incredible. One thing that blew me away was the sound of this crushing machine as it ground up bones and skulls. Wow! There’s a particularly nasty segment at the second cow (2:11 in the video) segment where the thing lets out this massive spurt as it’s being crunched up. That means that that dead cow had been decaying for a while and was getting bloated as dead animals tend to do. That’s another reason why this meat is not fit for consumption by humans. This video has been up for a few years, but it just started to go viral around mid-August 2009. Isn’t it incredible the stuff that we can see on the Interwebs? Before Al Gore invented the Internets, how many of us ever saw a rendering plant in action? The company that makes this sucker is out of Denmark. Just think of the tech that went into this machine. This thing is called the PB 30/60 Crusher. A few thoughts: Wouldn’t this be a great death penalty machine? Screw this lethal injection crap. 1st degree murder? I sentence you to the Grinder! We could sell tickets for large amounts of money for spectators to watch the killers get ground up alive and use the proceeds to help fund the state so the state can spend the money to help people. Damn I want one of these machines! Where can I buy one? I’d use it on some of my enemies. I would tie them up, throw them in the loader and dump them in the Grinder. Then I would charge like $1,000/head for spectators to watch, get rich and retire on the proceeds. We should use this thing on dead humans to grind them up. That way we could save lots of graveyard space and use the future would-be graveyard space to build strip malls and Walmarts and other useful things. Actually, I think when I die, I want to be ground up like this. We could make it like a funeral thing and all of the funeral guests could come watch me get ground up and eat popcorn and stuff. It would be a great end to my life. After I get ground up, I would like to be canned as Robert Lindsay Chow and fed to my pet cats, assuming that I have any. If I don’t have any cats, I would ask to be made into cat food, because I love cats, and this way, cats could feast on someone who really loves them. Cats have given me so much love in my life, this would be my special way of giving back! They should have had some really brutal death metal music playing in the background of this video, don’t you think? Wouldn’t it be cool to see a dead elephant or giraffe get thrown in that thing, just for fun? In my dream world, there would be like 600 channels on cable. One of them should be the Animal Shredder Channel. That channel would show nothing but this machine grinding animals all day. To make it more interesting, they could vary the types of animals getting ground up. I would just turn it on and leave it on for hours at a time while I do my work and whatnot, just like background you know. Except I would probably change the channel when I was eating. There are a lot of possibilities for alternate uses for this machine. We could take some fat White kid raised by a single Mom on Twinkies and video games and stick him underneath the machine. The meat from the ground up farm animals would fall all around him and all over him. It would land on his face, covering him. We would have workers with shovels to shovel the meat off of him so he wouldn’t get buried. He would keep his mouth open, and some of the meat would fall in. Then he would eat it. We would keep him under there, and he would get fatter and fatter. After about 10 years of that, he would be so fat that he could become the King of Germany. We could take the ground up animals and give them to Disney. Disney could reconstitute them into humans, especially teen idols like Selena, Miley and Britney. Little would their swooning fans realize that their favorite teen star was really a ground up horse! We could use the machine to try to solve intractable conflicts. By grinding up pigs and cows both and making movies of it and distributing it to conflict zones, possibly we could make headway in the Hindu-Muslim conflict in Kashmir. The possibilities are endless! If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Photos of Smithfield Foods' Granjas Carrol Site in La Gloria, Mexico

Dead pigs left out in the heat to rot. Scavengers have been feeding on these pigs.
Dead pigs left out in the heat to rot. Scavengers have been feeding on these pigs.
Dead pigs in a cart left out in the heat. It's not known if these pigs are supposed to be disposed of or made into food.
Dead pigs in a cart left out in the heat. It's not known if these pigs are supposed to be disposed of or made into food.
Dead pigs rotting away in the pig waste lagoon. The lagoon is filled with pig shit, pig piss, dead pigs, pig afterbirths, dead piglets stomped to death by their parents, on and on.
Dead pigs rotting away in the pig waste lagoon. The lagoon is filled with pig shit, pig piss, dead pigs, pig afterbirths, dead piglets stomped to death by their parents, on and on.
The famous pig shit lakes that bred the Swine Flu. The lakes are full of pig blood, pig shit, rotting dead pigs and other charming and delectable items. Note broken pipe. The smell from these lakes is so horrible that workers are sometimes overcome, pass out, and fall into the pig shit lake. Those who dive in to save them almost always die too. It sometimes takes weeks to fish the bodies out.
The famous pig shit lakes that bred the Swine Flu. The lakes are full of pig blood, pig shit, rotting dead pigs and other charming and delectable items. Note broken pipe. The smell from these lakes is so horrible that workers are sometimes overcome, pass out, and fall into the pig shit lake. Those who dive in to save them almost always die too. It sometimes takes weeks to fish the bodies out.
Aren’t these pig shit lakes just wonderful? Go capitalism go! Hat tip Cogitamus. From the Veracruz investigative reporting paper Enlace Veracruz 212. Of course, as is always the case in corrupt Third World capitalist hellholes, many of the people who complained about this mess have been harassed, detained, arrested, threatened, etc. by government officials whored out to the multinational. There doesn’t seem to be any getting away from this. All 3rd World capitalist states do this and there is no avoiding it. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It looks increasingly like this facility is where the Swine Flu was birthed. It’s not true that the company cleared its operation of guilt; this is just a corporate lie being shopped around by the whored out corporate media. Whored out medias in bed with monopoly capital are quite common in most capitalist states, and the US is no exception. There doesn’t seem to be any getting away from away from it. The papers are always run by corporations themselves, and they usually back up their corporate brethren. Once again, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature, and it’s unavoidable under capitalism. Much is being made of the fact that the Swine Flu turned out to be a fake scare, but it’s strange that it did kill many very healthy people, over 200 at last count. This is unusual for the flu, which usually kills the very sick and elderly, and it makes this flu all the more tragic.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Statement on Smithfield's Pig Factories

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s statement published in the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper in Poland in October, 2003. It kind of goes on and on, but you get the picture. Modern US neoliberal capitalism really is a pile of steaming pig shit, is it not? those capitalist apologists who say, “The problem is corruption” need to answer some questions. Why almost 10 n most capitalist countries, even the most advanced, and certainly in the less advanced, it is completely impossible to regulate Smithfield’s factory farms. As the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Freedom would note, to regulate Smithfield’s sickening factory farms is de facto if not de jure anti-capitalist. It’s bad for capitalism and it’s bad for he economy. Truth is that it simply cannot be done in most cases. Apologists for capitalism need to address the issue of why under most forms of capitalism it is simply impossible if not unthinkable to regulate Smithfield. Why is this? Capitalist apologists say it’s a bug, not a feature. It’s the other way around. Capitalism’s inability to regulate Smithfield is a feature, not a bug. You can also see by reading this that capitalism is completely destroying Poland. Fuck off Solidarnosc. Fuck off Lech Walesa. The article also lays bare the oft-repeated lie that Communism destroyed Poland’s environment. The opposite is true. Compared to capitalist West Europe, Poland’s environment is in excellent shape. 9 Storks have been almost exterminated in Europe, especially West Europe. There are only several pairs left in all of Denmark. The waters of capitalist West Europe are so polluted that the fish have been so poisoned that it has killed off all the storks. Relatively unpolluted Poland has a full 2 Communist Poland left us with the horrible legacy of Europe’s last clean-flowing rivers. The horrors! Poland has the cleanest soil in all of Europe. The horrors of Communism! It leaves nations with clean rivers, pure soil and lots of fish and birds! It’s clearly a failed system. Whatever the problems of Communist Poland, horrible pollution was clearly not one of them. Whatever the Veblenesque conspicuously consumable delights of modern Polish capitalism, a whored, corrupted and bought and paid for elite of politician-sluts was not one of them. ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. ON SMITHFIELD FOODS CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR: I am President of Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group and a leader of a national coalition of family farmers, fishermen, environmental and animal welfare organizations, religious and civic associations, and food safety advocates who are fighting Smithfield Foods in the United States. During the past eighteen months, I have come to Poland twice to alert the Polish people about the dangers of allowing Smithfield a foothold in this country, most recently at the request of the Animal Welfare Institute. Smithfield is one of a handful of large multinationals who are transforming global meat production from a traditional farm enterprise to factory style industrial production. Smithfield is the largest hog producer in the world and controls almost 3 Smithfield and its cronies have driven tens of thousands of family farmers off the land, shattered rural communities, poisoned thousands of miles of American waterways, killed billions of fish, put thousands of fishermen out of work, sickened rural residents and treated hundreds of millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty. Four years ago, in 1999, Smithfield began buying slaughterhouses and state farms in Poland. On July 22nd of this year, I sat in the crowded Senate Conference Room in the Polish Republic’s Senate Building in Warsaw listening as Smithfield’s Vice President Gregg Schmidt promised the senate agricultural committee that Smithfield will “modernize” Polish agriculture and bring prosperity and jobs to rural communities. For the past two decades, Smithfield Foods and its allies have made identical promises to the people of North Carolina, one of America’s rural states. After listening to these promises, the state Senate passed laws to make it much easier for Smithfield to do business in North Carolina. With encouragement from these politicians, Smithfield built the largest slaughterhouse in the world in Bladen County, North Carolina. The plant butchers 30,000 pigs each day. By building this pig slaughter plant, Smithfield set off explosive growth of a new way of producing hogs in North Carolina — factory-style production.

Factory Farms

Although Smithfield, a Virginia-based meat packer, never before owned a farm, its CEO, Joe Luter, began buying up farms so that the company could control, as he likes to boast, all aspects of pork production “from piglets to pork chops.” Luter who describes himself as “a tough man in a tough business” lives in a $17 million Park Avenue mansion in New York. He is known for a ruthless style that maximizes profits by industrializing agriculture and eliminating both animal husbandry and the family farm. Smithfield builds football field-sized warehouses in which the company crams thousands of genetically manipulated hogs into tiny metal boxes where they are deprived of sunlight, exercise, straw bedding, rooting, and social opportunities. A hog is as smart and sensitive as a dog. Under these crowded stressful conditions, they must be kept alive by constant doses of antibiotics, and heavy metals. Antibiotic resistant bacteria and residues of these additives naturally end up in their waste.

Industrial Style Pollution

Since a hog produces ten times the amount of waste as a human, a single hog factory can generate more fecal waste than Warsaw. One of Smithfield’s factories in Utah houses 850,000 hogs and produces more fecal waste than New York City’s 8.5 million people. Hog waste falls through slatted floors into a basement where it is periodically flushed into giant outdoor pits called lagoons. While cities must treat sewage before discharging it, Smithfield’s meat factories dump their liquid manure untreated onto fields which quickly become saturated. The manure then percolates into groundwater or is carried by rain into nearby streams or lakes. Waste from industrial pork factories contains a witch’s brew of nearly 400 dangerous substances, including heavy metals, antibiotics, hormones, deadly biocides, pesticides, and dozens of disease-causing viruses and microbes. Antibiotic residues in this lethal soup foster the growth of deadly “super bugs” — disease organisms that are immune to human antibiotics.

Polluted Water Supplies

Millions of tons of fecal stew produced by the meat factories has poisoned groundwaters in 34 states with deadly nitrates that can kill infants and cause severe mental retardation in children. Disease epidemics caused by meat factories have sickened and killed thousands of Americans. In 1993, for example, a meat operation’s microbes were suspected to have tainted a water supply sickened 400,000 people in Milwaukee (half the population!) and killed 114 individuals.

Sick Rivers

Fifteen years ago, the state of North Carolina had some of the purest waters in the United States. Today, it has some of the most polluted waters. A spill from one hog lagoon killed one billion fish in the Neuse River in 1995. North Carolina had to use bulldozers to plow the fish onto the shores of Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds. Today, as a result of Smithfield’s invasion in North Carolina, hog industry pollution has poisoned the Neuse so badly that a hundred million fish die every year die in that river.

Pfiesteria; the “Cell from Hell”

Hog factory contaminants have also fostered outbreaks of a previously unknown microbe, Pfiesteria piscicida, in America’s coastal waters. Pfiesteria kills billions of fish and causes open sores that won’t heal, severe respiratory illness and brain damage in humans who handle fish or swim in the water. Pustulating sores cover the bodies of fishermen from the Neuse River. Some of them have trouble recalling basic information like the route home due to brain damage from Pfiesteria. Pfiesteria has appeared in Maryland where my sister, until recently, was Lieutenant Governor. The state had to close the famous rivers of the Chesapeake Bay to protect public health.

Bad Odors

Hog factory stenches defy description. Neighboring farmers choke, vomit and faint from the fetid gases as they ride their tractors or work their fields. The smell cannot be removed from skin or clothing — even with the strongest soap. Food eaten even a mile downwind of a hog factory can take on the odor and flavor of hog waste. Neighbors can no longer sit on their porches in the summer, open their windows, hang their laundry or enjoy their meals. Factory odors can be so strong that they nauseate people flying in airplanes as high as 3,000 feet above these facilities!

Dangerous Gases

The fumes inside hog buildings are so strong that when the twenty-four hour ventilation systems fail, all pigs inside quickly die from asphyxiation. Hydrogen sulfide, methane and ammonia gases emanating from these factories also harm human health. Numerous studies show that factory farm workers and downwind neighbors contract lung disease, nausea, eye infections, nosebleeds, gastrointestinal illness, depression and even brain damage. Every year, hog factory workers become seriously ill and die from deadly gases emanating from liquid manure pits. Recent scientific papers by the U.S. government indicate that toxic air discharges from hog factories are so poisonous that they violate the federal health and environmental laws and endanger the health of neighbors. One study shows that millions of antibiotic resistant bacteria move by air from hog factories every day, threatening public health and neighboring herds. Another study shows that some meat factories emit seven times the particulate matter allowed under American Clear Air laws. Particulates can cause asthma attacks.

The End of the American Family Farm

Each hog factory puts ten family farmers out of business, replacing high quality agricultural jobs with three or four hourly wage workers in degrading jobs that are among the lowest paying and most dangerous in America. Because animals are given almost no husbandry, as few as two workers may tend a factory of 10,000 hogs! Conditions are so miserable that employees seldom endure these jobs more than a few months. Major slaughterhouses, including Smithfield’s, have a 100 The situation in North Carolina, America’s second largest hog producer, is typical. Two decades ago there were 27,000 family hog farmers in North Carolina. Today, there are almost none. North Carolina’s hog farmers have been replaced by 2,200 hog factories; 1,600 owned or indentured to a single multinational — Smithfield Foods. Smithfield now controls 7 As a result of factory farms, Iowa lost 45,000 independent hog farmers in recent years with half of the remaining 10,000 already controlled by Smithfield and a few other large corporations. Joe Luter told the Washington Post that Smithfield will turn “Poland into the Iowa of Europe.”

Contract Farmers; How to Become a Serf on Your Own Land

As I listened, Mr. Schmidt told the Polish Senate that Smithfield would bring employment to Polish farmers by giving them contracts to produce hogs. I can tell you that any farmer who signs a contract with Smithfield will become a serf on his own land. Here’s how Smithfield took over the family farms in America. Smithfield signed a few contracts with large producers to produce tens of thousands of hogs for its slaughterhouse. Then it swallowed those producers who had to take Smithfield’s price for their farms because they had nowhere else to slaughter their hogs. Once Smithfield owned these large farms the company began overproducing hogs so that the price of pork dropped from 60 cents per pound to 8 cents per pound. Since it costs 36 cents per pound for a farmer to raise a pig, most pig farmers had to go out of business except the ones that Smithfield signed contracts with. The contracts are never negotiated. The desperate farmers will sign the contract the way Smithfield writes it. Typically the contract requires the farmer to use his farm for security and borrow approximately $200,000 to build a warehouse according to Smithfield’s specifications. The company promises him approximately $20,000 per year. The farmer owns the warehouse and pays the insurance and interest to the bank. Under the contract, Smithfield owns the feed and the pigs, but the farmer owns the manure. Smithfield does not pay him enough to legally dispose of the manure. That’s his problem and soon it will be the problem of his community as he pollutes the air and water with the excess manure. Smithfield’s contract is typically good for only one-year even though it’s going to take the farmer twenty years to pay off the mortgage. When it is in Smithfield’s interest to buy more land, the company has the power to make future contracts so burdensome that the farmer goes bankrupt. Smithfield can then buy his hog house and land from the bank for pennies on the dollar. Since the farm is valueless without a Smithfield contract, there are no other bidders. It was in this way that Smithfield came to control pork production in North Carolina. The company is already using the same practices in Poland. Any farmer who signs such a contract will be a slave on his own farm. Now when the price of pork drops to 8 cents per pound, Smithfield continues to make money because the price the consumer pays for bacon at the grocery store stays the same. Since Smithfield owns the slaughterhouse, it can still make money while it squeezes the farmer until it has a monopoly or farm production. This is one of the reasons that the United States Senate today is considering national legislation, and many states as well, that will ban the ownership of farms by slaughterhouses. Smithfield’s “integration” system puts the farmer at a catastrophic disadvantage.

Economic Impacts

There are many studies that show that factory farms have a devastating impact on rural economies and quality of life. There is not a single empirical study showing net benefits to rural communities. Studies show that property values in counties hosting pork factories fall, on average by 3 If you drive through America’s rural communities, you will see bankrupted hardware and feed stores (factory farms don’t buy locally), boarded up main streets and closed banks, churches and schools. America’s heartland and historic landscapes are being emptied of rural Americans and occupied by large corporations.

Political Corruption

Hog factories produce far more manure than is needed to fertilize fields around them. The costs of properly treating and disposing this waste would make meat factories uncompetitive with traditional farms unless they violate numerous environmental laws. Traditional farms are exempt from these laws since manure, for them, is not a waste product but a valuable fertilizer spread on fields to grow crops. Because factory meat producers must break the law in order to survive, the industry’s business plan relies on the assumption that pork factories will be able to evade prosecution by improperly influencing government enforcement officials. Smithfield uses its wealth to buy politicians, paralyze regulatory agencies and break health and environmental laws with impunity. In North Carolina, Smithfield made business partnerships with both powerful state senator Wendell Murphy and powerful United States Senator Launch Faircloth, who protected the company’s interests in local and federal legislatures. Using adept campaign contributions and such cunning alliances, the hog industry has been able to corrupt and control the North Carolina State Senate. The state’s largest newspaper, Raleigh News and Observer, won the Pulitzer Prize for its five-part investigative report disclosing how the factory hog industry had captured and corrupted the state senate. Politicians who oppose the hog barons are punished. When North Carolina’s Duplin County State Assemblywoman Cynthia Watson began speaking out against Smithfield’s impact on her farm community, the hog industry launched a savage multimillion dollar attack, spending as much as $10,000 a week for two years to destroy her reputation. As a result, she lost her election and the hog barons sent a message to all the senators in North Carolina that if you speak out against this industry or this company, we will punish you! Citizens who protest get the same treatment. Typically, the industry launches its occupation by removing the democratic rights of local communities who refuse to site these facilities in their communities. In Iowa, North Carolina, Michigan and many other states and Canadian provinces, public officials have stripped local governments of their decision making powers over these facilities. Similarly, we have seen that in Poland, local officials who opposed Smithfield’s facilities have been overruled by national authorities. The industry routinely uses bullying lawyers and illegal intimidation, threats, harassment, and violence to terrorize and silence its critics including its own workers. A group of Nebraska citizens who made comments during a public hearing on a hog factory permit were sued by Nebraska’s largest livestock producer. Neighboring farmers are routinely sued for participating in public hearings or speaking out against the hog industry. Contempt for our laws and bullying are part of industry culture.

Criminal Behavior

Smithfield’s own records show that it has committed tens of thousands of violations of state and federal environmental laws. Indeed, recent court decisions indicate that hundreds of Smithfield’s facilities around the country are in almost daily violation of federal environmental laws. In 1997, a federal judge ordered Smithfield to pay $12 million dollars, one of the largest Clean Water Act penalties in history. The court determined that a single Smithfield plant had violated the Clean Water Act over 6,000 times and that company officials had intentionally lied to federal regulators to cover up its violations. In 2000, a National Labor Relations Board Judge found Smithfield guilty of serious labor law violations. The judge found that that Smithfield managers conspired with local police to physically intimidate and assault union supporters. He also found that Smithfield attorneys suborned perjury and that company witnesses lied under oath. Again in 2002, Smithfield was found guilty of significant labor law violations, this time by a federal court, which ordered the company to pay $755,000 in damages to workers who the company had wrongfully imprisoned.

Smithfield Invades Poland

In 1999, Smithfield announced its plans to move into Poland and began purchasing slaughterhouses that year. Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), one of our allies in the battle against Smithfield, brought a delegation of Poles over to tour the farm landscapes of America to see what they were in for. AWI took the Poles to Missouri where you can drive 50 kilometers without leaving company land and then to Duplin County, North Carolina, where they were enveloped in an unbearable stench. During this trip, one lady in North Carolina, Mrs. Carr, pleaded with the visiting Poles, “I’ve never been to Poland, but for God’s sake, don’t let them do to you what they’ve done to us.” The Polish delegation promised that this would never happen in Poland. Unfortunately it is happening now. Just as Smithfield used North Carolina to launch its takeover of American pork production in 1980, Poland is Smithfield’s platform for launching its bid for monopoly control of pork production in Europe. In 1999, Smithfield purchased Animex, the state-owned conglomerate of giant communist-era farms and nine slaughterhouses that export Polish sausage and ham to the United States. The deal was a bargain, Luter paid only $55 million just after Animex, at state expense, made extensive renovations. For example, the government’s Constar plant brought ultra modern equipment from the U.S. just before the Smithfield takeover. Estimated value of the company following these improvements was $500 million. Luter boasted that he paid, “only 10 cents on the dollar.” Gaining monopoly control of the country’s slaughterhouse capacity is more difficult in Poland because there are over 4,000 slaughterhouses in this country. Smithfield’s strategy was to get the government to do its dirty work by closing down the competition. At Smithfield’s request, the Polish government began closing hundreds of small slaughterhouses after Joe Luter had a three-hour meeting with President Buzek. Buzek’s Minister of Agriculture promulgated regulations that would put up to 5 The government justified these new rules under the fraudulent pretense that small slaughterhouses must be shut down to comply with the EU regulations. However, EU regulations clearly state that small slaughterhouses may be kept open to serve regional markets. In fact, Germany, France and Sweden fought to keep their small slaughterhouse and milk plants open and even subsidize them knowing that those are the core of local markets and food distribution. Once the small slaughterhouses disappear, local markets quickly follow. Furthermore, large high-tech slaughterhouses do no make a safer food supply. In the U.S. and in England, the closure of small slaughterhouses actually coincided with an increase of meat-borne disease by 30 This is because large centralized slaughterhouses force pork production onto factory farms where disease is rampant and because of long transport distances, stress the animals and spread disease. Furthermore, technologies that increase line speed inside the slaughterhouse multiply worker errors and make proper inspections impossible. (Now the big slaughterhouses are insisting on the controversial technology of irradiation in order to solve their problems of diseases vectors.) The Polish government took a number of other steps to facilitate Smithfield’s takeover of Polish agriculture. For example, the government legalized liquid manure and tried to dismantle the Animal Welfare Act. The government allowed Smithfield to buy and lease farms in Poland despite official policies forbidding foreigners to purchase agricultural land. In addition, the government gave large pork export subsides to Smithfield amounting to 55 cents per kilo. These subsidies are intended to benefit Polish farmers but since Smithfield imports both its pigs and the feed, there is not much benefit to Poland. With this help, Smithfield has converted as many as thirty-five state farms to hog factories. One of these, in Nielep, West Pomerania, already houses 30,000 hogs. To circumvent Polish laws, some of these are owned by front companies wholly owned by Smithfield. Typically Smithfield has only one of several directors in each but the company charter requires unanimous votes. Prima Farms, for example, is officially owned by two Poles but every important decision must be signed by Mr. Griffith of Smithfield. In this way, Smithfield can capture subsidies from the EU intended for Polish farmers.

Polish agriculture

In mid-July, I spent a week touring the agricultural areas of northern Poland. I learned that you have in Poland something that we’ve lost in the United States and something we miss very much. Poland is an oasis of traditional farming in a world dominated by agribusiness multinationals. Poland has over two million farmers — as many as the half of Europe put together. About 1 In Poland, you don’t see the vast monocultures of row crops that we are now accustomed to in the United States. Polish farmers rotate a variety of crops, in the traditional way that fosters healthy soils. I was thrilled that many farmhouses had occupied stork nests on their roofs. Poland hosts 2 Poland has large stands of timber and Europe’s last clean flowing rivers. Poland has purer soils than anywhere else in Europe. Its land is uncontaminated by pesticide and fertilizer residue, and according to Professor Andrzej Mocek, Dean of the faculty of agronomy in Poznan, an astounding 9

Polish Foods

One morning, we ate breakfast with the Kornilo-Jarzyna family at their farm near the village of Nowodwory. Agrotourism is a growing business in Poland, where farmers take in tourists who come to fish, hike, pick berries, or just eat great food. Great slabs of traditional Polish sausage and meats, open jugs of homemade honey of acacia or linden smothered our breakfast table. We slapped pork fat onto plum rolls like butter and ate pierogis filled with buckwheat, homemade cheese and  mint and sweetened with berries and spices. My favorite was bigos stew which Polish hunters invented by adding various meats to a perpetual pot of boiling cabbage — delicious! This farm family makes their own butter and cans their own jelly. The house is surrounded by hives, orchards of cherries, apples, pears, and plums with understories of black currants, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. I was full as a tick! It’s no wonder that people from Lublin and Warsaw and all over Europe come here to indulge in chemical-free foods with real farm flavor. I thought about the poor taste of food in the United States where there has been a dramatic decline in meat quality due to factory farming of pigs and poultry. Many American chefs, food writers and home cooks have entirely abandoned cooking pork raised by industrial meat companies like Smithfield because they find it dry and flavorless. These deficiencies are apparently due to the manner in which confinement pork is bred and raised. Millions of years of natural selection have endowed hogs with back fat to regulate body temperature. But Smithfield gets more money from meat than from fat so the company has bred its own strain of super-lean pigs born with almost no back fat. They are high strung and unable to survive normal outside temperatures. According to food professionals, this extreme leanness has dramatically diminished the eating quality of American pork. An article in the April/May Saveur Magazine describes the pigs of modern confinement agriculture as being so skinny that they looked “like dachshunds.” And an article in the May 4, 2003 New York Times Magazine applauded the old breeds and traditional farming methods of the kind used in Poland, pointing out that “the pork industry has managed to engineer a pig with almost no fat at all. And this is why most modern recipes for pork involve some kind of liquid — putting the meat in a marinade before cooking, basting it while cooking or braising it in broth. If you simply grill a mass-market pork chop, it becomes inedibly dry.” The Times then observes that free-range pork, in contrast, “is rich when sliced and sautéed, fine textured and robust in flavor. It needs nothing more than seasoning with salt.” The dryness and poor taste of confinement pork have gotten so bad that many major pork companies are now “enhancing” their pork — adding water, flavored liquids, or even stock to their tray-pack and prepared meats and using red food coloring to improve its drab appearance.

North Carolina Comes to Poland

Smithfield is already putting its trademark on Polish farms and rural communities. On July 19th, I visited the town of Wieckowice, a beautiful village with shrines and wooden and brick homes with tile roofs and long barns of brick and stone. We ran across several dozen local activists carrying signs outside a former state farm owned by Animex where Smithfield reportedly houses 17,000 hogs. The facility has permits for only 500 cows and 500 hogs. Governor Nowakowski of Poznan told me that all the local citizens are adamantly opposed to Smithfield Foods and that he refused to give the company permits when it bought the farm two years ago. But 6 months later the Environmental Ministry overrode him. The Animex farm is 40 yards from an elementary school where, according to the residents, children get sick and vomit from the hog odors. Among the protesters was a dignified woman, Irena Kowalak, who served as village mayor for 35 years. She told us she had resigned recently because of intimidation by Smithfield. Thanks to the governor, Smithfield is not able to get permits for liquid manure, so the farm uses straw bedding and has not yet devised a plan for disposing of its waste. Fields of wheat surround the hog barns but they are never harvested since Smithfield is not interested in agriculture. To Smithfield, these fields are a place to dump the notorious wastes of industrial meat production. A convoy of indignant Wieckowice residents drove me out to see the giant pile of hog manure. On the side of a 1,000 acre wheat field, I saw a mountain of hog waste 150 meters long, 12 feet high and 50 meters wide. “Seventeen thousand hogs for 6 months,” a young man said nodding at the pile. Local authorities have been ordering Smithfield to move the illegal pile for six months, but the company has refused. The night before my visit, Smithfield covered its pile with a giant black tarp, which was already inflated and writhing with the internal pressure of methane gas. Six hundred meters downhill from the pile, villagers had created a public beach on a 1,500 acre lake where umbrellas shaded dozens of families swimming and playing on a steamy 90ş day. Manure residues fester on the shores of a nearby embayment into which Smithfield’s waste pile drains. An old man with twinkling blue eyes sticks his hand into the water, smells his fingers and offers us a whiff. “Smithfield Foods!” he says. Governor Nowakowski told us that another Smithfield factory in Sedziny with 4,500 hogs only has a permit for 1,000 cows. The governor said his assistants were now inspecting the facility. “But,” he said, “the legislation is very difficult for the local government to enforce [without support of the state].” Unfortunately, the federal government is not supporting him. He is not the only local politician begging for federal help. Zofia Wilczynska, a member of Parliament, has complained to the government that a Smithfield operation in Polczyn Zdroj is endangering the village’s 400-year old health spa. Another health spa in Goldap is also threatened by pollution from a Smithfield facility. The following day, I met with the deputy of the Agriculture Committee of Parliament who told us that the Agricultural Ministry has recently conducted an investigation of sixteen Smithfield farms — fourteen owned by Smithfield and two farms owned by front groups controlled by Smithfield — and found that all Poland’s veterinary and health laws and construction standards had been broken at every one. Even when Smithfield lacks proper permits or breaks the law, the company gets laughable fines of a few hundred dollars for their lawbreaking. Not all local officials are opposed to Smithfield’s operations. One hundred sixty kilometers north of Wieckowice in western Pomerania, the mayor of another village, Wierzchowo, gave Smithfield permits for two enormous farms after Smithfield paid his wife approximately $4,000 to perform the Environmental Impact Assessment for the company. We witnessed firsthand not only Smithfield’s lawbreaking but the economic impacts of its production methods on local communities and markets. When Smithfield took over Animex, the company’s three principal farms in northeastern Poland, near Goldap, employed sixty workers. Now, following the farms’ conversion to automated hog factories, only seven workers remain. Smithfield says it wants to produce six million pigs per year in Poland. Polish peasants now produce 20 million pigs per year and a quarter of them will have to lose their jobs to make way for Smithfield. Smithfield is already squeezing the small farms. In Pomerania, we found that the small slaughterhouses had already been closed and that the remaining slaughterhouse, which was owned by Smithfield, would not slaughter hogs from the small farms. The rest of Poland will soon follow. Once Smithfield controls the slaughterhouses and has eliminated local markets from farmers, it will be able to control prices and it will soon control the farms.

The Tyranny of Monopoly Capitalism

When I told Polish audiences about Smithfield’s behavior in the Unites States, Poles were absolutely astounded that an American company could behave so badly. There is such an enduring faith in America and American capitalism and such a hunger for capital investment in a nation left behind after the Second World War when the rest of Europe was feasting on the Marshall Plan, German reparations and free market capitalism. The Polish people’s love for America and faith in our system made me doubly determined not to allow Smithfield to take advantage of them. POLES, DEFEND YOUR PIGS, DEFEND YOUR COUNTRY! (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland October, 2003)

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